Centralized services like Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo keep all your eggs in one basket. This means that bad actors only need to attack one weak link to compromise all your data. And there are many ways to do it, including DDoS, Man-in-the-Middle, and credential stealing to name a few. Decentralized services keep your data safe and secure by distributing it across many redundant servers with cutting-edge cryptography that ensures your data is complete, immutable, and incorruptible. Of course, there are many degrees of decentralization. In this article, we explore the varieties of decentralization, their history and evolution, and the benefits each decentralized consensus algorithm has to offer your business, NGO, or non-profit.

In the early days of crypto, privacy was a critical focus in blockchain development but difficult for the average user to achieve. From 2011–2014, creating multi-signature transactions was considered a cutting-edge technique that provided advanced users more privacy and security than executing standard peer-to-peer transactions alone. Now multisig is standard and more user friendly than ever. So, what’s changed in the last 5 years? And when can we expect blockchains to deliver practical privacy for non-technical users and businesses?

While the high crypto valuations of late 2017 have crashed and we’ve entered into the early stages of our current ‘crypto winter,’ the global fervor for developing innovative blockchain solutions and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) shows no signs of slowing down. So, what can we expect in 2019? Here are 3 up-and-coming crypto trends jockeying for success within today’s uncertain blockchain landscape.

Every day cryptocurrency and blockchain startups in the U.S. face a lingering regulatory question, “how do you fit a square peg in a round hole?” Here I summarize how regulatory uncertainty affects blockchain development, what last week’s SEC commentary means for cryptocurrencies, and explain how decentralized applications are positioned within today’s regulatory landscape.